Republicans shut down the House to protect Trump from the Epstein Files
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But Steve Bannon says the story is over, and when has he ever made an argument in bad faith?
The House has largely come to a halt as Republican leaders struggle to assuage a group of irate lawmakers who are demanding that the Justice Department release files related to deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The House will adjourn Wednesday, a day earlier than expected, for its five-week recess from Washington after Republicans blocked most legislation from reaching the chamber floor for a vote this week. That means any move to release the files won’t come to the floor until at least September, if ever.
The move by House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) will effectively avoid dealing with an issue — for now — that is causing worry and anger among rank-and-file Republicans after a decision by President Donald Trump’s Justice Department not to release the files, which stirred a furious backlash among the MAGA base — and from lawmakers’ GOP constituents. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), a key Trump ally who has criticized the administration on this issue, said “the call volume on Epstein” to her congressional and district offices “has almost been 100 percent.”
I assume those callers thought they were calling the Wall Street Journal‘s offices?
As Josh Marshall says, the fact that both the executive and legislative branches are acting with increasing desperation to shut the story down it increasingly hard to reconcile with the idea that there’s nothing incriminating in the DOJ’s records:
Today we learn that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will be meeting with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell looking for the “real pedophile” and presumably coordinating stories. And just this morning while meeting with the President of the Philippines, President Trump told reporters his intelligence chief has now proven that Hillary Clinton and “Barack Hussein Obama” are guilty of “treason” and they “ought to take a look at that and stop talking about” the Epstein files.
It’s really not too much to say that just as the House has been shut down to avoid more Epstein cover-up votes, the executive branch is now more or less exclusively focused on trying to shut down the Epstein story: MLK assassination documents, a meeting with Maxwell, a new Hillary/Obama treason investigation. It’s all they’re doing.
I keep thinking some new thing will happen or people will lose interest. This weekend there was an emerging conventional wisdom in the Beltway publications that Trump had flipped the script with the Wall Street Journal article, something that never made much sense. But that clearly wasn’t the case and Trump himself forced it back to the top of news attention with his flurry of new diversions.
What can possibly be in those files?
It’s a very good question.